She stood slowly, her body limned by firelight. “Jackson? Is that you?”
He took a step, halting and unsure, then he ran to her, grabbed her into his arms and squeezed her tight. “Don’t leave. Please don’t leave.”
Her palms pressed hot into his chest, and she gained enough space between them to look up into his face. “I do not want to. I’m not.” She reached up and wiped wetness from his cheek.
Rain drops or…? Zeus and Jove and the entire pantheon! Was he crying? He laughed, throwing his head back, and the sound seemed to make its own thunder. He crushed her tighter to him. “You’re still here. You’re still here.” Solid and shivering in his arms.
“Where did you think I went?” she asked, a mumble against his chest.
“You’re cold,” he said against her soaked hair.
“I made a fire.”
Indeed, a fire roared at the end of the banquet hall, in a fireplace almost as large as the wall. The hall’s windows were blank, glassless eyes, and the roof had only half-survived the centuries. Large holes opened the room to the sky and the rain. But not near the fire where his father’s ratty armchair and dusty rug remained. It glowed, an elemental invitation Jackson could not resist.
He pulled her toward it. “I didn’t know where you had gone. My father’s manuscript has been found, you had plans to leave, and when I returned to the manor, Mrs. Whitlock tells me she’s offended you, and I thought… I thought…”
“You made the quite logical conclusion that I’d fled.”
“Yes.”
“I did not. As you see. I went for a walk to clear my head, to think. And the rain caught me, but I saw the castle roof through the trees and ran for it. Not before I was soaked to the very bone. As you see.” She bit her lip and looked into the fire.
He rubbed his hands up and down her arms.
“Did Mrs. Whitlock tell you her suspicions?”
“No specifics. Only that she had offended and was sorry.”
She turned from the flames to look at him, and they danced in her eyes, a sea of fire. “It’s time for me to tell you. I am sorry I’ve taken so long. Where to start?”
She paced away from him. When she returned, he sat her on the rug near the fire and joined her. They faced one another, legs crossed before them, and he stretched out his hands, offering his strength.
She took them, and before the leaping flames, she held his gaze as well, forging a connection between them that felt strong as steel. “Do you remember our conversation with Mr. Stewart? How he acted toward me?”
“He did not treat you as a lady.” A grumble. A growl. “He asked questions today, but I threatened to set his books ablaze, and that shut him up quick enough.”
She gasped. “You would never, Jackson Cavendish! All those books!”
“I wouldn’t. I’d rather put my fist in his face, but he needn’t know that. He’s less scared of a fist than he is of losing his ill-organized library.”
“As he should be.” She let the lightness between them fade and squeezed his hands. “He is not the first man to think Miss Smith a woman of easy virtue. Or none. Nor is he the first to think Mrs. Mary Bartlett a lightskirt.” She laughed, a sound full of pebbles and sand and shards of glass, a dried river bottom of a sound. “Go ahead. Ask. Ask me who Mrs. Mary Bartlett is.”
He swallowed hard. The truth so close at hand. Did he welcome it or dread it? Above them, the skies wept, beside them, the fire crackled. He raked his fingers through his hair, pushing the wet strands away from his forehead, and dropped his gaze to Gwendolyn.
Her hair hung loose, thick and sodden down her back, and tendrils clung to her cheeks. But she hardly seemed to notice. She looked at him but did not look at him, trapped somewhere far off.
“Mrs. Mary Bartlett,” she said, “is me. Though I was born Lady Mary Lytemore.” She looked at the fire once more.
And he waited. Did she wait for him to speak? He had questions. An entire ruined castle’s worth of questions. But he could wait. Her story, when told in her own time, would likely answer all of them.
“’Tis lucky,” she finally said, “that there was wood and a tinder box here.”
“My father kept it here. Just in case. For occasions like this, I can only assume.”
“I like a prepared man.” She chuckled, but it sounded hollow. Her hands slipped from his as she stood. Hugging herself tight, she wandered away from him, a solo dance around the shattered room.
She stopped at the edge of a hole in the roof and stuck her hand out, let the rain pelt her skin as she turned her arm over and over. Some drops bounced and others soaked deep, and they fell with a rhythm, a patter that she set her words to. “The first time a man propositioned me, I was twenty-one. The scandal had been in the papers but a day, and naïve as I was, I took a walk through Hyde Park. I thought a hooded cloak could hide me, didn’t really know I’d need to be hidden. I thought it a private wound, a tragedy no one would know of but me. And I needed air. It had been weeks since I’d felt like I’d taken a full breath.”
